I have some big life updates to share with you all!
Earlier this Summer, I left OpenAI, and after getting to know the team at Mercor over the last few months, I made the decision to jump all in and help them build the future of how talent gets matched with work.
Excited to say we’re announcing our Series A today, $32M raised from Benchmark, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, two of OpenAI’s board members, Larry Summers and Adam D’angelo, and many others at a $250M valuation.
This decision to join Mercor wasn’t all that hard when I looked at these three things:
1️⃣ The ideal vendor to power research progress has changed meaningfully, and Mercor is embracing that from the ground up. Today’s models need experts in their respective fields to push them further, experts need to be treated like experts, and that means trust, culture, and team engagement is paramount.
2️⃣ It’s not just about really good operations. When I left OpenAI, I had several folks recommend I start my own data annotation startup, but I couldn’t figure out what the spark would be that would make it more than just a services company. Mercor is not trying to solve better data annotation, we’re solving how candidates and jobs get matched with features such as AI-led interviews to understand someone’s subject matter expertise deeply. It just so happens that this is extremely useful for finding the niche types of experts that AI labs need right now.
3️⃣ We work way too hard to not love the people and dynamics we do it with - The energy and enthusiasm at Mercor is super high, and our clients and our talent are seeing that reflected back. Being at a place where I can be comfortable just being myself is really important. This is the youngest team I have ever worked with but also one of the most mature teams in terms of how we show up for each other and our customers.